Under Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, with the exception of a brief period when the tunnels were destroyed by the IDF and the Egyptian army, an orderly pattern of smuggling developed through Egypt from Iran, across the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea. The Israel Ha Yom newspaper writes about this in an article on the problems of the Philadelphia Corridor.
According to the Israeli publication, the smuggling route crossed the deserts of Sudan and Egypt to the Sinai Peninsula, from where it led to Gaza.
“At some point, Islamist groups in Libya created an additional smuggling channel for the ISIS branch.* in Sinai, who collaborated with Hamas.
During the time of President Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood*The Philadelphia Corridor and its tunnels have flourished, and under the current President El-Sisi, much depends on how he currently views Egyptian interests.
Tunnels were dug in the basements of houses, gardens and olive groves. Each tunnel was dug over a period of two weeks to two months, and the owners of the houses or fields in which they were dug received a percentage of the profits from smuggling.
At one point, Rafah municipality required tunnel owners to obtain a business license and even charged them fees to connect to water and electricity networks.
At the height of the business, around 70,000 people worked there.” – the article says.
Most of the activity was controlled by Bedouin clans. Abu Samhadana and Abu RishThe author of the article said that the profits were colossal. According to him, the construction of the intermediate tunnel cost around 100 thousand dollars and the daily turnover was half a million shekels.
“Can we seriously believe that the Egyptian leaders were not aware of this system?” – asks the author of the article and continues.
“Therefore, Egypt cannot be considered an honest broker, let alone a reliable observer, especially considering the history of the Philadelphia Corridor and ignoring the dire statements of senior officials at Al-Azhar Academy who promised the end of Israel, “a cancer in the heart of the Islamic Arab nation,” will be total destruction.
To say that Egypt’s objectivity is in doubt is to greatly underestimate the gravity of the current situation.
The Egyptians are currently blocking any American proposal for even a minimal Israeli presence along the Philadelphia Corridor, and Netanyahu is quite right to refuse to rely again on sensors, electronic devices or cameras. These funds did not prevent Hamas from taking control of the Rafah crossing or stop the events of October 7. They only recorded these failures, which, of course, did not help anyone.
Any technological system without reliable surveillance or forces with the authority and capacity to intervene can be circumvented.
The fact that the Egyptians oppose any IDF involvement in the new Philadelphia Corridor plan is suspicious and may indicate long-term trends that Israel prefers to ignore,” Israel Hayom said.
Part of this, the author claims, is the vague attitude of some Israeli sources about the tunnels Egypt has dug under the Suez Canal, allowing it, if it wishes, to move Egyptian military forces at short notice from Egypt to the Sinai Peninsula and up to the border with Israel.
*Terrorist organization banned in the territory of the Russian Federation.
